Mother pleads guilty in drowning case

EL CAJON  A mother who was sleeping when her two children drowned in a La Mesa-area backyard pool pleaded guilty Monday to two counts of felony child endangerment.

Tassie Behrens, 28, faces up to seven years and four months in prison at a sentencing hearing scheduled for Sept. 17 in El Cajon Superior Court. She had also faced several drug-related charges, including possession and cultivation of marijuana for sale. Those charges were dismissed in light of her plea.

According to testimony presented at a previous hearing, Behrens was staying with Lawrence Dangelo on May 13, 2013, when her two children — Jason Bradford, 2, and Harley Bradford, 16 months — were found in the pool at the rented Sunset Avenue home.

Behrens told investigators she considered Dangelo her boyfriend, but it wasn’t “official.”

On the day the children were found, she told a sheriff’s detective she had been at the house with her son and daughter the night before, and took them swimming around 8 p.m. Later, she put them to bed in the living room and went into the bedroom with Dangelo.

About 8 a.m. the next morning, her son came into the bedroom and asked where his sister was, according to the testimony. Behrens told the detective she went back to sleep.

The defendant said she woke up again about an hour later and saw that the children were not in the living room. She went out to the back patio and found them both face down in the pool.

She initially told the detective her children had drowned in a pool at a mobile-home park, but then quickly admitted that was not true.

Dangelo, 45, was accused of growing marijuana in the house. A U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration special agent testified that two of the three bedrooms in the home had been converted into grow rooms.

He pleaded guilty Monday to one count of manufacturing honey oil — derived from marijuana — and agreed to a 5-year prison sentence.